Hi

Thanks for your kind comments, We started collecting some bits and pieces August last year so it has not been a quick build either
Only had the time to be able to work on it one day a week so I guess that has slowed things down a lot.

Cheers
Tony

Hi All,

Well at long last we are now cutting, still got a few things to sort out though. We were using one of the Chinese spindels and Vfd's however have not had much success integrating it with Mach3 so now we are going down the path of the Hitachi Vfd/Modbus with the Chinese spindel. We are having better success but still working our way through all the settings to try and get it right and full integration with Mach3.

Latest Photo:


Video Link:
http://s142.photobucket.com/albums/r120/scotsmanfaewayback/?action=view&current=IMAG0042.mp4

Cheers
Tony.

Hi Tony,

Very professional looking machine you have constructed there and it works just as well as it looks.

Please keep us posted on the things that you, and your buddy make on your machines.

Tweakie.

Very nice build.  I love the over-engineered bits.  I tried to do that with my build, but you guys raised the bar in that dept.  Can you show a pict of your control box?

Barry

No worries Barry 

Photo of our Control box's which houses all the electronics as well as the touch screen.



Cheers
Tony.

That's novel Tony - Space Invaders on a touch screen. 

Seriously though, very nice work.

Tweakie.

Great pair of builds Tony. I always liked the mechmate design... stole some of its ideas for my build

Some pretty fast rapids too. How many steps/mm are your units geared at?
I'll need to convert to servos to ramp mine up.

If you don't mind me asking what were your issues with the Huanyang? I agree the Hitatchi is a better unit but I've got mine integrated with Mach using Matty's plugin without issue.

Cheers

Mark

Hi Mark,

Checking the steps in my motor tuning settings within Mach3 we are currently running them at around 153 steps / mm.
Our issues to be honest all disappeared when we changed the RS485 convertor to the Industrial one we are using now.
So the Huanyang will make a good back up if I we ever have any issues or failures with the Hitachi.
The cheaper Chinese RS 485 to USB converters seem to be very much a hit and miss, for anybody going down the Huanyang path I would strongly suggest theses converters http://www.commfront.com/USB-Serial-Adapters-Converters/Isolated-USB-RS232-RS485-RS422-Converter.htm
over several others.
A friend and fellow MM'er spent many a sleepless night and  a lot of time and effort working his way through this with good outcomes.

Here are a couple of little video clips of MM finally under Mach3 control.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfMdLPgGKf0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtCUoT3yKFA

Cheers
Tony.

 

  yep I'm hearing you with those sleepless nights. For me it was getting the noise issues sorted that the VFD creates for a smoothstepper.

Hey if it was easy everyone would do it... right! ... Instead of just us crazy folk.

Have fun with the new toy.